Meanings
- uncountableIndulgence in concerns of the flesh; bodily appetites.
when strong passion, or weake fleshlinesse / Would from the right way seeke to draw him wide, / He would through temperance and stedfastnesse, / Teach him the weake to strengthen [...].
1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC2 more examples
The more recent pictures of the painter Gérôme unite all these attributes in a singular degree; above all, the fleshliness and materialism which make his studies of the nude, in my judgment, altogether inadmissible into the rank of the fine arts.
1871, John Ruskin, Lectures on Landscape, Lecture 2[…] the remarkable and profoundly significant thing was that though the human being, both male and female, was endowed with sex, and although the localization of the dæmonic in the loins fitted the man better than the woman, yet the whole curse of fleshliness, of slavery to sex, was laid upon the woman.
1948, Thomas Mann, chapter 13, in Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, transl., Doctor Faustus, New York: KnopfSynonyms: carnality
Synonyms & antonyms
nounIndulgence in concerns of the flesh; bodily appetites.
Origin
Cite this entry
fleshliness. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/fleshliness
“fleshliness.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/fleshliness. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “fleshliness,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/fleshliness.
Source: fleshliness on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.